2015.03.01

At the end of January, on our last day in Istanbul before flying to the USA, we lunched at Kadikoy institution Halil, producer of a quite spectacular lahmacun. Lahmacun, if you don't know it, is basically a wood oven-cooked flatbread with a thin shmear of spicy meat paste.

'Turkish pizza', some call it -- but why? Yes, lahmacun and pizza share a composition of dough with topping. They are both baked. There the similarity ends.

I understand the desire to make familiar unfamiliar foods. Really, I do. I struggle with it as I write recipes for this Turkish cookbook Dave and I are working on. While some dishes in the book (hummus, dolma, cacik or yogurt with cucumber) will no doubt be familiar even to those who've never traveled to Turkey, others -- dried corn and collard greens soup and black-peppery bulgur orbs swimming in oregano-flecked yogurt sauce, for instance -- will likely be unknown even to many of those who have.

Some cooks (and cookbook buyers) are excited by unfamiliar dishes. Others are put off. I don't want anyone to look at my book and be put off, not least because I'm convinced that this food is Really, Really Good.

So how do I convince the timid cook to go beyond his or her comfort zone? Should I resort to what I'll call the Turkish Pizza Method and call a dish what it is not in order to convince readers that they will be cooking and eating something familiar when in fact they won't?

That loose, almost soupy herb, yogurt and bulgur dish --- maybe I should call it a 'risotto' because it's a dish of grains cooked with sort-of liquids that, like a true risotto, ends up spoon-able and creamy and so delicious that you can't stop eating it. Maybe I should name it a 'risotto' because that might convince cooks for whom the combination of yogurt and bulgur would otherwise give pause.

No. I don't think so.

'Don't pander,' my editor said to me when we met a few weeks ago to swoon over Dave's photographs, talk recipes and ponder design and cover shots. (Cover shots! Yes, it's all seeming very real now.)

A chickpea durum (flatbread wrapped around chickpeas and herbs) is not a 'Gaziantep burrito'. Ayran is not a 'Turkish smoothie'. Manti is not 'Turkish ravioli'. (It is a Turkish dumpling.) Simit is not a 'Turkish bagel'. And if you follow my recipe for that bulgur, herb and yogurt dish? Well, you won't end up with a 'risotto'.

The problem with the Turkish Pizza Method of describing and naming dishes is that it often ends up distorting the final product. Set a Google alert for 'Turkish restaurant' and you'll see photographs of lahmacun -- usually described on menus as 'Turkish pizza' -- that would make a Turkish eater from the south east (where it originates) cry. Thick discs of pale dough burdened by way too much chunky meat, sometimes cheese -- this is what the non-Turkish diner expects when a menu item reads 'Turkish pizza'. And all too often, even in restaurants owned by Turks (and even in Turkey! see Sultanahmet/Istanbul Old City), this is what a lahmacun is.

This is what a lahmacun should be (with some regional variation): about 60 grams of sturdy dough rolled into a thin disc, lightly spread with two or so tablespoons (sometimes even less -- see the dough peeking crust peeking through the topping in that photo up top?) of meat minced to a true paste with chili, some onion and perhaps other seasonings, baked in a super-hot oven (wood-fired, preferably) until it's blistered on the bottom. The way Halil makes it, a lahmacun's bottom crust cracks as you fold it in thirds over stems of parsley anointed with a few drops of lemon.

Lahmacun is lahmacun. I'm convinced that anyone reading this post would adore this Turkish dish prepared as it is in its native place. It's even easy to pronounce -- LAH-mah-joon. There will be a recipe in our book. I won't call it 'Turkish Pizza'.

2014.05.07

We're just back from Turkey and Australia. In the former, we formally (ie. with contract in hand) began work on our cookbook. In Oz, Dave and I spoke (separately) on food travel writing and food and travel photography (terrifying at first, absolute fun in the end) at the Words to Go bloggers' workshop attached to the annual Tasting Australia. It was an intense 5.5 weeks, every day filled with good food and new friendships. We managed to fit in a wee bit of vacation in Sydney in at the end. In just a little over 2 weeks we'll be off again, back to Turkey.

Our Turkey time was spent mostly in the southeast. We've been before, but never for such an extended period, and never feeling the sort of pressure -- lovely lucky pressure, but pressure nonetheless -- that comes with a manuscript deadline hovering in the back of your mind. We worked as we usually do: mostly on our own, feeling our way, meeting people in markets and bakeries and restaurants and on farms and orchards and wherever else one meets perfect strangers willing to share time, a recipe, a story, their home, their workplace. There were ups and downs, but mostly there were high highs. My notebooks are filled with more stories and recipes than I can ever fit into a single chapter. (Some of them will end up here.)

We're so excited about what we experienced and documented -- and ate! -- on this trip. This -- getting out there, meeting people, cooking and eating and photographing up a storm -- is what we live for. Those three weeks were a reminder that we really are astoundingly lucky to be able to call this work.

We flew from Istanbul to Gaziantep, where we picked up a car and overnighted before setting off. From there we drove a sort of lopsided counterclockwise almost-circle, covering about 1000 miles excluding day trips before we dropped the car off back in Gaziantep 22 days later.

Our first stop was Sanliurfa, a bland-looking modern city with a lovely preserved historic core of sandstone houses and a fascinating covered bazaar.

In Sanliurfa isotis king. You might know this pepper in its dried and ground form, when it's very dark, with a beguiling sweet-hot flavor reminiscent of Mexican ancho chilies. I'd never seen isot in fresh form but that was remedied in Sanliurfa, where it was everywhere, sold in markets and at small corner shops, skewered for grills, carried in tepsi, or pans, to the community oven for roasting. Sanliurfali eat fresh isot morning, noon and night.

There is almost no time of the day when Sanliurfa doesn't smell like barbecue. A favorite kebab is liver. Before you turn your nose up, know that the liver is cut into small cubes that char and crust beautifully over the fire and that it's eaten wrapped in soft lavash with fresh parsley and mint, grilled isot peppers if you dare, and an addictive almost kimchee-like onion salad-relish flavored with pomegranate molasses and isot paste, among other ingredients. Fantastic.

Even for breakfast, as in this photo above.

When we weren't scoping out the bazaar or skulking about grill stalls so that Dave could photograph over the shoulders of diners we spent a bit of time with a woman who is committed to preserving local culinary traditions. From her I learned the recipe for several dishes, including a simple crepe with walnuts and a one-pot meal of baldo rice pilaf with small whole onions and chunks of lamb cooked for three hours with pepper and tomato pastes. The latter dish may sound laborious but, like many of the recipes I've collected in eastern Turkey, is deceptively simple, using just a few ingredients and requiring only 20 minutes, if that, of active time.

While eating breakfast at our guest house one morning (we arrived intending to stay one night and ended up staying four -- Hasankeyf is that kind of place) the daily bread arrived by red bike. The white sheet hung from a tree practically begged Dave to take advantage.

We spent a bit of time with a couple of households learning to make a lovely egg bread in the tandir (aka tandoor) oven. What's the best way to use up extra dough? Deep-fry it and salt it, of course, for a hot snack.

Then we backtracked to Mardin, from where we reported a story on the city's first bienale almost four years ago, stopping en route for glasses of bracing, reviving ayran (salted and water-thinned yogurt) made with a mixture of sheep, goat and cow's milk. (As an aside, this salty-sour-milky drink has become my go-to refreshment right after we arrive in lstanbul from Malaysia. It's soothing to a jet-lagged stomach and the saltiness brilliantly combats the dehydration that hits on long flights.)

Once we arrived, there was fragrant spice bread, meat, parsley and onion-filled hand pies, an addictive crepe-like concoction filled with fresh cheese and soaked in not-too-sweet syrup and, well, some of the finest meatballs I have ever eaten. Our stay in Mardin was very short, only two nights, but we can't wait to return and dig more deeply into the local cuisine.

Our book will have a strong seasonal component, and so throughout this journey we had our eye out for what spring means for local diets. We learned that, to be honest, spring isn't as over-the-top bountiful as fall is. But I did gather recipes for some season delights like peas, young cardoons, otlar or wild herbs and greens (many of which are actually cultivated in the Unites States). The spring produce that showed up most often, everywhere we stopped, was marul or a type of romaine lettuce -- big, sturdy, flavorful-with-a-hint-of-bitterness heads of romaine lettuce. Would you stuff and stew romaine? Southeastern Turkish cooks do, and it is absolutely delicious.

On to Diyarbakir, with its black basalt city walls and breakfast obsession. Most every Turk we know adores breakfast, and we've certainly eaten some fine ones around Turkey (especially in Van), but Diyarbakir breakfasts blew us away. Our favorite breakfast dish opens this post (see up top): a very simple fried eggs with sliced long green peppers and beef confit.

Why we travel in Turkey by car: the ability it gives us to pursue not-pursueable-by-bus obsessions like cheese, even if it means driving, twice, to a village far from the city to observe milking, and the cheese making process, afterwards to be welcomed by the cheese maker's generous family with a lunch of cheese (of course!), charrred peppers and eggplants, spicy potatoes, cucumber and tomato salad, fresh melty butter and homemade bread.

Another reason we travel Turkey by car: the freedom to take less direct routes between cities that reward the effort with views like this. We're quite partial to the northeastern provinces and the Black Sea coast, but on this road trip we took in some of the most spectacular scenery we've ever come across in Turkey. Spring had truly sprung, everything was green and the air was sparkling.

Right in the midst of this undulating sea of green we stumbled upon a place Dave and I call Heaven. That's not the real name of the village, but it's how the village's residents (just seven households) described it to us. "We have everything we need here," one spry eighty year-old man told us. Indeed, as we sat down to this "snack" (whey cheese and fresh butter, meant to be smashed together, fresh cow cheese, yogurt mixed with young pistachio tree leaves, green almonds and green plums, bread from the tandir -- you know, just a little something you might throw together for unexpected guests, everything grown, foraged or produced in the village) in the late afternoon sunshine and drank in a view much like the one in the photo above, it was hard not to agree.

That road eventually delivered us, after an unplanned ride on a car ferry, to Adiyaman, where around 5pm seemingly every firin (wood oven bakery) in town turns out not only plain pide for dinner, but pide laden with bubbling cheese and sugar for pre-dinner snack. A bit greasy? Yes. Addictive? You bet. We skipped dinner that night.

From Adiyaman we drove south to Hatay, which borders Syria on the south and is edged by the Mediterranean on the west, and where we found enough goodness to merit a Part II. Stay tuned.

For more food images from Turkey see our tumblr (heavy on photos, light on text) Eating Turkey and Dave's photo blog SkyBlueSky. When on the road in Turkey we post intermittently, but update our culinary meanderings with photos and a few words pretty often on Facebook, and Twitter (@EatingAsia).

2014.04.03

Last March Dave left me in Istanbul and took off for Gaziantep, in Turkey's southeast, to work alongside writer Ansel Mullins (of Istanbul Eats and Culinary Backstreets) on a story about the city's kebab culture.(That story appeared in the June 2013 issue of Saveur, which was devoted to grilling around the world). Look -- I know that there are worse places to be left than Istanbul. But the food photos that Dave emailed to me while he was away left me feeling quite sorry for myself. Even worse were the stories he brought back, of a parade of fire-kissed kebabs and squares of the ultimate baklava crowned with sheep's milk kaymak (think clotted cream ten times better).

Well it's a year later and here we are in Gaziantep (Antep, as the city is known to Turks), a brief stop before we embark on three weeks of book research. And how glad I am for last year's abandonment. Because thanks to that assignment, Dave knows just where we should take our first bite of Turkey's southeast.

Şirvan Baklava has been around for 20 years or more, and despite its moniker the place is known as much -- if not more -- for its kebabs as it is for baklava. It's a place that Dave has mentioned often over the last 12 months.

A Şirvan selection: desert truffle kebab in the middle, simit kebab second beneath it

This being spring, Şirvan is featuring seasonal keme mantari (desert "truffles", big knobby fungi that grow beneath the ground) on its kebap menu, making the most of the fungi by mincing them together with lamb and lamb fat (the basis of any good kebab is plenty of fat minced into the meat) and then skewering logs of the mince between chunks of truffle. Few Antep kebapci serve keme, and Şirvan's go fast. We score the last two skewers of the day, and feel lucky. The keme are deeply earthy but not overpowering, and the chewiness of the whole specimens is a fine complement to the tender, melting meat-and-mushroom mince.

Preparing keme mantari kebabi

Dave insists we also order skewers of simit kebab. In this instance the word simit refers not to the sesame seed-coated 'Turkish bagel' that's sold all over Istanbul (and across the country) but to fine bulgur, which cooks all over Turkey often incorporate into kebabs and kofte.

Mince together green pistachios, as Şirvan does, with fine bulgur, lamb and plenty of lamb tail fat and you've got a kebab that scales textural heights. Though combined to comprise a thoroughly kebab-ish whole, the ingredients in Şirvan's simit kebab somehow maintain their integrity: with each bite one's tongue detects grains of bulgur and nubs of pistachio and incredibly, the grain's wheatiness and the oily freshness of the nut come through despite the richness of meat and fat.

Kebabs are not fast food. Meat must be minced with plenty of fat, and then with other ingredients, by hand. Always by hand. Then the kebab must be assembled with a touch both firm -- molding the meat to the metal with enough force so that it sticks -- and light, so that the bits of meat don't become one heavy mass. Once the skewers are on the fire a truly skilled kebapci takes time to slowly, slowly, carefully, carefully coax the meat to just barely done, moist and tender inside yet lightly crusty outside.

Everything's delicious. But not a single dish steals the limelight from the main attraction.

We're finalists (again! we've yet to win) in the annual Saveur magazine Food Blog Awards. If you're so inclined, you can vote for us -- in the Culinary Travel Blog category -- here. You'll have to register to vote, a minor pain. Thanks for your support!

2014.01.01

Almost sixteen years ago to the day I booked our first trip to Turkey. Dave and I were living in Shanghai at the time and Chinese New Year was just around the corner: a nice long slice of vacation time to do with as we pleased. After a so-awful-it's-funny Christmas trip to Guizhou we were determined to travel as far from China as we could. Our award miles would take us as far as Europe, but Europe was expensive. Somehow (advice of friends? an article in a travel pub? for the life of me I can't recall) we decided on Turkey.

We arrived in Istanbul after midnight and glided into Sultanahmet, the old city, along the ribbon of road that runs along the Bosphorus. I remember gawping up at the minarets of the Blue Mosque as our taxi slide along silent streets to our guesthouse, falling into a deep sleep beneath thick duvets on a charmingly high bed, and being jolted awake before dawn by the call the prayer bellowing from a loudspeaker affixed beneath our window. I sat up ramrod straight, delirious with jet lag and, for the minute it took me to figure out what that noise was, scared silly. I think I fell in love with Istanbul, with its ability to surprise and astonish me, right then. We lingered in the city for 10 bitingly cold days, extending our stay when I came down with a horrible cold. For 48 hours I lay in our room, hunkered feverishly but happily beneath the duvet, watching snow fall as I ate lentil soup and rice pudding that Dave brought from nearby shops.

I got better and we hit the road. We flew to Izmir and picked up a car, visited a deserted Ephesus and drove south. It was way, way off-season. In Bodrum a storm knocked out power. Our room's ceiling began to leak, making it impossible to use our fireplace to keep warm. We hastily repacked the car and drove through the rain to Aphrodisias, where the only pension open had no heat or hot water and was run by two strangely hostile brothers who served canned tomato soup for dinner. Our compensation was waking after a night of thunder and lightning to a spectacular and empty (except for us) archeological site set against a backdrop of mountains whose peaks had overnite been freshly frosted with what looked like swirls of buttercream.

Further east at a lakeside resort, restaurants were closed; our hotel's owner took pity on us and defrosted two schnitzel. In Konya, which Istanbul people had warned us would be "very conservative", residents approached us on the street to shake hands and wish us a good trip. Antalya was our Turkish food epiphany. We stayed in an old house in Kaleici owned by a slightly eccentric woman named Perla who kept box tortoises in her large leafy courtyard. Perla and her partner Ali loved to eat, and drink. Every night was an orgy of meze and white wine followed by a perfect grilled fish. Further along the coast, in a seaside village walking distance to the Eternal Flame, we stayed in a bright white room with gauzy turquoise curtains and ate our breakfasts in an orange grove warmed by the sun -- in February.

We returned to Istanbul in love and obsessed with Turkey, Turks, Turkish food, Turkish towns, Turkish ruins and the wide open Turkish road, all of it. On the flight back to Shanghai I turned to Dave and told him that as soon as I could find a teacher I would study Turkish. I added, "I don't know how and I don't know when, but some day Turkey will be a big part of our lives."

***

Nine months later we moved back to the Bay Area, and I found a Turkish tutor, then joined first-year Turkish classes at UC Berkeley mid-year. My teacher was a Turkish cookbook author: Kismet! Only I and one other student enrolled in her second-year class, so she split us up for private tutorials. I gained halfway decent proficiency via a steady diet of food magazines and newspaper columns and stories that touched on Turkish culinary culture. Meanwhile Dave and I continued to vacation in Turkey once a year, always following a stop in Istanbul with a long road trip out east. (My biggest regret: no notes from any of those trips.)

Midway through my sixth semester of Turkish we moved to Bangkok, and set our Turkey obsession aside to immerse ourselves in southeast Asia, a place we'd long wanted to explore. We moved to Saigon, then Kuala Lumpur. We started this blog. I began freelancing and, after leaving his corporate job at the end of 2008, so did Dave.

In 2010, nine years after our last trip to Turkey, we returned so that Dave could attend a photography workshop. Being back was like slipping on a well-worn glove; Istanbul still fit. Before the workshop began we flew out east to Gaziantep and picked up a car. We drove and drove, first to Mardin -- where I stumbled across a travel story -- and then to Midyat, Van, Kars and Erzurum. Along the way we ate. And ate. Back in Istanbul we extended our stay beyond Dave's workshop, first by a few days, then by a week, then by another week. If we hadn't had a home and pets and responsibilities waiting back in Malaysia for us, it's entirely possible that we'd be one of those ex-pats you meet in Istanbul who came to the city for a visit, and then a second visit ... and never left.

***

We returned to Turkey six months later, again in the middle of winter, way way off-season. I love Istanbul most in the winter under gray skies and drizzle; I especially love it under a blanket of snow. After eating fresh anchovies at a Black Sea restaurant in Beyoglu we decided to go to the Black Sea to eat them in situ. We met a fishmonger in Sinop and struck up a friendship. We visited wonderful markets and ate delicious dishes that didn't fit most Western pre-conceptions of "Turkish food". We met home cooks who allowed us into their kitchens and master bakers who invited us behind their marble slabs.

And we returned home to Malaysia with an idea: a book. But could we? Could I write a book about Turkish food? More important: could I sell a book about what essentially began as a crazy obsession?

***

After nine or ten research trips, two years of on-and-off book proposal writing (with the help of a great editor/coach) and photograph collecting, an at times demoralizing month pitching agents followed by six months of tinkering with the proposal under the guidance of the one who took our project to heart, and four weeks of nail-biting as the proposal went out to and was reviewed by publishers, we had our answer. Last October, as we were finishing up our latest eastern Turkey roadtrip with a few days in -- of all places -- Sinop, we learned that yes, we could sell a book born of our obsession with a country and a people and a cuisine that we came to know by chance, a place that -- Who knows? -- we might never have visited if we hadn't been so eager, that winter 16 years ago, to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and China (Shanghai, thank you.)

We have no title yet for our book, but we can tell you that it will be filled with mouthwatering recipes, plenty of gorgeous photographs, and stories -- about markets and farmers and cheese producers and other food artisans, and ingredients and home cooks in their kitchens and bakers -- from Istanbul and Turkey's eastern half. It will not be EatingAsia in book form, but you'll recognize my voice and Dave's eyes in the text and images on its pages.

I'm honored and still rather shocked to be working with a woman who has edited Jacques Pepin. Rux Martin Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish [Title ToBeDecided] in 2016.

***

Before I jumped wholeheartedly into freelancing I took a food writing class taught by a then-editor at Bon Appetit. One of her sagest pieces of advice: "Give into your obsessions. They can become great stories." And, apparently, books.

Over the two-plus years that I worked on our book proposal I had so many doubts, and so many fears. (And as I contemplate turning in a completed manuscript in 18 months, I have new doubts and fears!) It often seemed silly, this gut desire to write a book on Turkish food. But I'm so glad I pushed on. You never know where an obsession will lead.

For 2014, I wish everyone reading this the time and opportunity to really give in to an obsession. Am I telling you to quit your job, sell your belongings and travel the world? To chuck it all and become a writer? To pick up a camera and become a photographer? No. But if there is something -- an activity, a language, a dance, a species of orchid, a cuisine.... whatever -- that intrigues you, give in to your curiosity and pursue it, even if for only an hour a week. Life is short. Do that for yourself.

2013.07.14

If there is a country that loves grilling more than Turkey does, I don't know it. This is a population that stows barbecues in the trunks of cars, ready to be stoked up -- in a park or a parking lot, on a hill, by a river or a roadside, even on a traffic median -- at a moment's notice. In winter of 2012 we passed a group hunkered in a snowdrift by the freeway breakdown lane on Ankara's outskirts. As a middle-aged woman skewered meat, her (presumably) husband fanned the grill's flames. The thermometer on our dashboard read 1C.

"Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow ...." The old saw about the American postman would apply to the Turkish griller, if it also included a reference to Hades-like heat. Such were the weather conditions at the beginning of last week in Diyarbakir [dee-YAHR-bah-ker], in Turkey's inland southeast, where the skies were cloudless and daytime temperatures hovered around 41C (106F). Night brought little relief.

After several hours wandering the city's old section the last thing I wanted to do was sit in the smoke path of a flaming grill. But in Diyarbakir the night belongs to the izgara usta (BBQ master). After dusk it's near impossible to walk a block without bumping into a wheeled cart belching meaty smoke.

Assembling a couple to go

We were there to sample local specialties, and grilled anything -- liver especially -- is one. So we gave in and selected a mobile operation that came with tables and proper seating -- banquettes with backs and cushions, no less! -- set not street-side, but in the street. This was no Penang-style barebones street food operation. The grill anchoring one end of the cart was big, with room for at least twenty skewers laid side by side. At the other end a refrigerated case displayed liver, heart, gizzard, neck, kidney, chicken wings and chunks of beef and lamb and chicken breast, all skewered, seasoned, and ready to char.

We placed our order (chicken wings, beef chunks, lamb liver) and sat. The usta's helpers layed before us the fixings of a feast: roasted whole small onions and long thin green peppers, sliced tomatoes and fresh onion, two plates of coban salatasi (chopped tomato-onion-cucumber-parsley salad) and a platter heaped with fresh rocket leaves with wedges of lemon for squeezing. We raised a hand to the teenager tending a nearby ayran cart, and soon we held glasses of ice-cold salted yogurt thinned with water and seasoned with fresh herbs.

Soon the guests of honor arrived, each kebap on a separate platter, another piled with thin flatbreads. The beef was smoky and surprisingly tender and the chicken wings, seasoned with nothing other than salt and pepper, were deeply browned and crackly-skinned with moist flesh that fell off the bones.

A common night sight on Diyarbakir streets

To be honest the liver was a bit on the dry side, despite the fact that our usta had skewered it between chunks of lamb fat (a common technique). There are probably better liver kebapci in Diyarbakir. But I was happy enough to eat my fair share, and I'm not what you'd call an offal obsessive. We ate our kebaps as rolled sandwiches, using our flatbreads to slide the meat off its skewers and then adding salad, a bit of onion and green pepper (the latter surprisingly spicy), a few leaves of rocket, a squeeze of lemon, relishing every bite as sweat ran in rivulets down our backs.

I've never been much of a liver lover, but that kebap turned me. Was it the liver? Or was it Diyarbakir itself, a city that confounded, challenged and intrigued me all at the same time. I'll return, and I'll order liver kebab again, too. But not till autumn, after the mercury falls.

2010.08.13

James Brown certainly wasn't describing the Turkish çay evi(tea house) when he crooned those four words, but he could have been. Even in Istanbul -- but especially in Turkey's more conservative east -- the çay evi is a cultural artifact claimed by males. It's run by men, staffed by men (and often boys, who work as tea runners, delivering orders beyond the tea house), and frequented by men.

In the east çay evi are everywhere, two or three to a city block. Tea houses are community halls, gossip nodes, places where men come together with their friends. They're where backgammon and cards (and other games that we're not familiar with) are played and TV is watched.

They're where buyers and sellers gather to compare purchases and sales after a morning at the market.

They're where a prayer bead maker might set up shop and a watch seller peddle his wares.

Turkish tea houses are also spots for solitary pursuits: a bite of breakfast, an hour or three of silent contemplation. They're where, if you are a retired Turkish gentleman, you might go to get away from the house, because the house is where the women are. You might call the çay evian extension of the living room, if Turkish families were made up of nothing but men and boys.

I can't claim to be in tune with a culture that dictates that a goodly portion of its population spend the majority of its time inside the house. But it is what it is. We fell hard for eastern Turkey, and we especially love its çay evi.

As a woman I rarely felt unwelcome in a tea house -- but then again I'm a yabanci, or foreigner, and I was accompanied by a male. (I'm also "of a certain age", which in Asia and Turkey commands a respect, deference, and certain amount of courtesy that it doesn't in the United States.)

And the weather was fine so we often sat outside, especially if a çay evi was crowded. If ordering required walking inside, Dave would take care of it. He payed for our tea most of the time (when we weren't being treated -- that happened often.). And invariably if one of the men wanted to chat he'd turn to Dave first.

I spent a fair amount of time pondering this as we made our way around eastern Turkey, this "tea house as man's world" thing and my place in it. I am a strong woman, I think, who's never thought of herself as anything but equal to men. Yet here I was retreating to the background, allowing Dave to test the waters in a tea house before we decided whether or not to drink there, sitting outside so as not to offend, so sensitive to appearances that I'd avoid paying for my own tea if I could.

And yet -- some of our best, most memorable encounters in eastern Turkey took place in tea houses. Once a customer figured out that it was I, not Dave, with whom he could communicate the conversation flowed. And flowed. That I was a woman seemed to be a non-issue (or maybe, as a yabanci I am a sort of undefinable 'non-woman'.)

(As an aside, all of this tea house conversation made me wish that women in eastern Turkey had gathering places similarly accessible to travelers -- because the one thing I lacked, and wished for, on this trip were more opportunities to talk to women.)

We spent hours in (and on stools in front of) tea houses. Beautiful old tea houses with sweeping views of the Syrian plains in Mardin.

Newer, characterless tea houses with pleasant outdoor courtyards in Van. A cubbyhole of a tea house in Gaziantep, where we watched the owner assemble an order of 25 glasses in about 3 minutes.

In çay evi we learned that -- unlike American cafes and Malaysian coffee shops -- it's quite OK to bring in outside food and drink.

That laying your glass on its side when you've finished means you've had enough, and that turning it upside down means the tea wasn't good.

That Erzurumlu like a slice of lemon in their tea.

That in the east the sugar cube goes not in the glass, but under your tongue or just inside your bottom lip (like chewing tobacco) or between your lips, to be melted with each sip. (Sugar cubes in the east are also harder and denser.)

That the only man allowed in the tea maker's cubicle -- besides the tea maker -- is Ataturk.

That for us, "Cay içer misiniz?" ("Will you drink some tea?") are among the three most evocative words in the Turkish language.

For more glimpses of Turkey hop over to Sky Blue Sky, where Dave has posted some lovely portraits he shot in the strange little southeastern town of Midyat. View it here.